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Levi Pennington People

1965

How It Feels to be Ninety Years Old How It Feels to be Ninety Years Old

Levi T. Pennington

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Recommended Citation Recommended Citation Pennington, Levi T., "How It Feels to be Ninety Years Old" (1965). Levi Pennington. 26. https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/levi_pennington/26

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HOW IX mL3 TO BS YMH3 OW

That's a question that some of my friends would" likefor me to answer, especially some of the young ■bd)ys and girls whoare not more than 65 years old or something like that, "How does itfeel to he ninety years old?" Well, I'll try to tell you a hitahout

And I'll have to say that*^^^many ways it feels at ninetyyears very much as it felt at nineteen. I hope that I have moresense than I had at nineteen, and I am grateful that I have my senses"in a fair state of preservation", as my father used to say — indeed I think that is rather too conservative a statement. Hot thatsight and hearing are as keen as they were seventy years ago,for instance; hut what comes to me through sight, hearing, smell, tasteand touch are much as they were as long ago as I can remember.

Pain, for instance, Is much like it was "away hack when".And the feel of a cool hreeze on a hot day is the same as It waswhen I was a hoy, even if it does not have as much hair to hlow intodisorder, if it was not in that condition before the hreeze sprangup. The feel of a warm blanket on a cold night -- how can a manget into a warm bed and straighten out on a mattress that conformsto his anatomy with a "go to sleep" caress, without gratitude toGod and a sigh fftiBtnTnlBhiniBm and a prayer for the millions who neverhave a comfortable bed from the time they are born in poverty andsqualor till the time they are laid away where their bodies couldnot feel pain if they were transfixed with a hundred daggers -- whostarted me on thoughts like these? I "was trying to tell you howthe sense of touch works much as it did when I was teaching my firstcountry school more than a year before I was nineteen.

And roses and violets and lilacs -- and arbutus, thatmasterpiece of God's creation in the world of wild flowers/-- andmany other things in the realm of fragrance smell much as they didwhen I was nineteen, and long before that, and all the years since.(And the odor of mephitis mephitis -- it used to be mephitis mephit-ica before they changed the system of scientific nomenclature -- isjust what it used to be, but what's the idea of bringing\that up?)^enever I see a lovely flower, I want to look at it with my noseas well as my eyes. A rose without fragrance is like a mrnTramnmbeautiful woman without religion. I don't plant roses any morethat do not have fragrance.

And roast beef tastes as good as it ever did. This yearat a college dinner I ate a slice of it that tasted so good that Icould remember only once in my life when I had had as good a pieceof roast beef. Mince pie has the same tang that it had the firsttime I ever tasted it, and I think I like it rather better than Idid then. There is nobody on earth that can make as good apple pieas Rebecca used to make, but good restaurant apple pie is as goodas good restaurant pie ever "was. And the same goes for more thanforty kinds of fish that I have eaten -- don't you go to questioningthat statement, for I've counted, and I find that I've caught morethan forty kinds of fish, and have eaten more than fifty kinds, andif you want a list I can furnish it. My sense of taste is still keen.

And the song of the robin, the rose-breasted and theblack-headed grosbeak, the cardinal, the song sparrow, the brownthrasher, and many other birds that I could name; the rich tones of

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the organ, the versatile music of the piano, the sparkling accentsof the violin -- how could my Quaker ancestors think that it vra-san instrument of the devil? the great orchestra, the "band, themighty chorus -- all these and many other forms of music are as delightful as they ever were. And I could include a mother*s lullaby— I riininiTtiih do not get to hear that as often as I used to hear it —and the tinkle of sleign bells and of the brook that runs right pastthe door of El TeePee, my cottage at the coast, and the sighing ofthe wind in the trees, and the frightening roar of the thunder andthe crash of the lightning, and the sob of the sea and the voiceof love -- "Oh for the touch of a vanished h^, the sound of a voicethat is still" --I can't hear a watch tick as far from me as I usedto hear it, but I am rich in the many sounds that flood God's world.(And why must I think of the sound of a sob or the groan of pain?How grateful we should he that there is promise of a land where"There shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neithershall there be any more pain,")

I intended to save the best for the last, the sense ofsight. I need spectacles for reading, and with my bifocals I cansee distant things better than I can without them. But a lovelyflower, a gorgeous sunset, a snow-capped mountain (wait a minute;iD never saw a snow-capped mountain till I was pas^^^irjry-fiv^,a pretty girl, a beautiful woman, none of these J&pe lost t-h^Tcharm for me. And the face of a tender mother is among the mostbeautiful things that God and love have ever combined to produce.And the smile of a loving wife is the most beautiful sight thatthis mundane world has for human eyes to see. Only the man who hashad the blessed privilege of looking into the face of her who ismore than all the rest of the world to him can even guess what itmeans when her dear face can be seen only in memory. That sweetestsmile on earth that it was so long my privilege to see so manythousand times -- at nineteen I never had had such a delight whichthe sense of sight provided for much more than half a century.

Well, as I told you before, being ninety years old feelsmuch like being nineteen, only much richer and fuller in its joys —and sorrows.

But truth would compel the recognition and recording ofthe fact that in many ways being ninety years old feels very different from being nineteen. The difference is wide in the physicalrealm, the mental, the spiritual, the social, and so on.

In the physical, to statTt at the bottom — well, makeit literal and start with feet and legs. "The old gray mare maTnwTBiftain't what she used to be", and the same thing is true of the lowerlimbs -- it wasn't really nice to say legs when I was a boy, evenwhen talking ahout men, and when talking ahout women, as men didin those days at times, if you were in polite society you did notadmit in words that legs were concealed under those voluminousskitts that swept the ground -- let/s not think ahout Thesweepings were lot attractive. Well, it was my legs that I startedto mentfon. They used^to^take^me^u^^tla|_stairs^tLt it^'tos^rlally heen stepped on. I used to win the hundred yarddash whh a eood Lai of regularity (and the fifty yard dash, anddash, and I hop y ^ (list furnished on request), butnof non^p if I Bat on a tack or if lightning struck the house.

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Lot's not dwell long on the physical, I once took abarrel of salt off the dray and carried it across the wide walk tothe store in Greilickville''"'®r was it on this side of that suburbin what was known earlier as Slabtown?<); the other day I carried a50-pound sack of potatoes to my car half a block away, and when Icame back to the stor^ I asked the wife of the proprietor of thestore why a fifty pound sack of potatoes was so much heavier thanit used to bejaaad ahe said it was the same weight that it had alwaysbeen. I asked her why it seemed so much heavier, and she remarkedwith a very nice smile, "I guess we'd better not go into that,"Many a time, as Shakespeare expresses it, I have "watched the horologuea double rtKtmsvfmgmxrmm set" for "drink rocked not my cradle 1 yes, Ihave worked the clock three times around, and once almost fourtimesj but now if I've had only four hours of sleep the night beforeI can fall asleep at my typewriter without even waiting for a period,I used to be "the iron man"; now I don't work very hard physically,nor very long at a time.

But I'm losing interes.t, I could go on from my startwith tbe deterioration of my nether supports -- I'd rather be lameat that end than the^ther — and speak of various other parts ofmy physical organism, but what's the use? The machinery is considerably worn. As John Q,uincy Adams used to say when asked how hewas, "I am all right; but the house I live in is not what it usedto be, and some day I shall be moving out of it," (If I do notq,uote him verbatim, he will not hold it against me, I am sure,

I have his idea clearly in mind.)

Mentally folks seems to think that I am clear in mythinking, and I am glad to agree with them, I can enjoy Browning'sProspice or Tennysoji's In Memoriam or Pitz-Gerald ♦ s Rubaiyat orMilton's Paradise Lost or Shakespeare's Hamlet or prost's MendingWall or Robinson's Richard Corey or Lowell's Commemoration Ode orLincoln's Gettysburg Speech or David's Shepherd Psalm or Plato'sAj^ology or Hoover's God Bless Sf&u -- I can enjoy these and manyother things as well as I ever did, and even more; and I am stillsiiXficiently sane so that I can thoroughly detest such things asthe alleged "poems" of Gertrude Stein, and Winter's Caliper byan unknown poetess — and the more completely unknown the better.If there is sense in auch pronouncements as "Hothing mumbles butbricks is miscellaneous" I never have had sen^ enough to see it,(Ouch! Who switched me on to this sidetrack?#;

The one big difference betweenthat at nineteen the road that had 1»een traveled was short, andthe road ahead seemed long" — almost ofroad that has heen traveled is long, and in the verytgings there are not many more miles ahead.

Looking ahead,as one of advanced years must do, Iwrote, or it seemed that it almost wrote itself,

THE LAST HOUR

whpn the last hour has come and T lie waitingT?nr that srim summons to the other world;por fitrieving, longing,loving, hating

lAben hurled;Into the p I have known is fast receding^lSd^i:ilT^e^heIieved^s fading,

^ISd^Iverything ia done, and naught's to do;

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iShen the last moment comes , and I am sinkingOut of all life as I have known it here,

May it "be mine to meet my end unshrinking;Let me go out of life v/ithout a fear.

What scenes I next shall see I do not know,But may I have a "brave heart as I go.

And in another and simpler vein:

GCOD-UIGHT

When I was just a little hoy, as came the close of d'ayMy mothered tuck me in my hed -- you know a mother's way —And then she'd kiss my lips afcid hrow, and softly she

would say,"Good-night, dear son, I'll see you in the morning."

The years passed on, long, crowded years. As closedone winter day

I sat hy Mother's bedside — she could no longer stay.I stooped to kiss her whitening lips and heard her

softly say,"Good-night, dear son, I'll see you in the morning."

The deepening shades of evening will compass me some day.My dimming eyes v/ill look into the future dark and gray,God grant that in that hour some loving heart to me may say,

"Good-night, good-night, I'll see you in the morning."

How hlest I have been in having such a mother and suc^a wife as were mine., Browning, looking toward the end, wrotey^..35fc^

I was ever a fighter -- so one fight more,The best and the lasts

I should hate that Death bandaged my eyes and forbore,And let me creep.past,

Ho S let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers,The heroes of old.

Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrearsOf pain, darkness and cold,

T'or sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,The black minute's at end.

And the element's rage, the fiend voices that raveShall dwindle, shall blend,

Shall change, shall become first a peace out of patfn,Then a light, then thy breast,

Oh, thou soul of my soulS I shall clasp thee again,And with God be the rest,

ffflnTBTnTrftBTniiiTnmTiTrnmffimmffi

When I am gone I hope that those who have loved me beyondall my deserTing may think in the words of Thomas Gray,

Thpv alike in trembling hppe repose,)hosL of his J-ather anS his God.